E-assignment 1

Rambling

After all these years, the opportunity suddenly presented itself. I had been dying to tell somebody my story, not literally dying, but I was feeling some distress at not having been able to share it with anyone yet. And here was my chance! We were supposed to meet in a bar called The Golden Anchor, a renovated old barn picturesquely located in the sparsely inhabited outskirts of town. It was scheduled to go down on the coming Tuesday at 8pm - that's 20:00 in digital time, we are after all living in a digital world, so why be stubborn? Considering the planned date, there would probably only be retired old men there; few working people go for a story-telling night over a couple of pints on a weekday, and for some reason the older generation of females believe the whole thing to be a strictly masculine pastime.

Old men suited me just fine, for there is something altogether fascinating about people who are considerably closer to their deaths than their births. It makes you wonder, beneath all that feeding of birds and the walking slightly bent forward with hands behind their backs as though they have no troubles whatsoever, maybe there is someone screaming in terrified anguish at what is to come? Surely no one can truly accept dying. I mean, there are people who are used to death, like doctors, but experiencing death is not the same thing as experiencing dying. Death is instantaneous, whereas dying is a constant throughout life. We generally do not think too much about our inevitable destination until the decaying of our bodies becomes too evident for us to ignore, when we become old. I wonder if the old think much about their steady decline as they near their end. I believe that they must. When their brittle bones and worn-out muscles make the local grocery store suddenly seem light-years away and when their minds start running slowly or in circles due to their brains' drying up, they must become painfully aware of the accelerating speed at which they approach that final darkness.

What a nightmare it must be when a wrinkled, old leathery face looks back at you from the bathroom mirror every morning, seemingly asking “what the fuck happened to you?”. The eyes would be the most sinister detail of the reflection; they grow very tired with age; the spectrum of emotions that can be mediated through them shrinks considerably until they only show a hopeless languidness and a slight hint of fear.

I suppose everyone fears death, it's just that it doesn't show until the face starts wrinkling up to statically show what expressions of emotion have most frequently been possessing it. The fearful eyes seem a universal trait, but the richness of death's carvings extend much further than to the eyes alone. The old are sculpted like dancers in a morbid masquerade for walking corpses where everyone is wearing their own dramatic mask of creased skin telling their summarized life-stories to anyone who cares to look. Among the participants there would be the merry old man whose constant smiling and laughing has made his face freeze to a somewhat daft and spacey expression, like he sincerely believes he can cheat death with a smile. There is also the old lady from hell, her hatred towards children and laughter – especially the combination - having carved deep crevices to either side of her drooping, purple lipstick-covered mouth. She isn't dancing though, she probably finds a fiend to befriend who she can hate dancing with. The life-long scholar is also tripping the light fantastic, his furrowed brow now more furrow than brow. His true pride and joy in his life were his theories, but his theories has done him no good, he's just as dying as the rest of them.

A funeral agency could turn the metaphor concrete, organizing a ballroom party for the not-quite-but-almost-dead. It would be the perfect way to reach out to their designated clientèle. At the end of the evening everyone could place their orders together with an approximation of how much longer they had to live. What a jolly celebration of death it would be.

But there is nothing to celebrate though, is there? If you distance yourself from idealistic delusions of its beauty and the highly irrational definitions of it one can get from fiction, there is not much left than a simple act of disappearance. Heck, even I fear death, and I'm not even that close. I've surely got another forty or fifty years in me, and hopefully technology will have advanced far enough by then to make me live a couple of hundred years more, or, better yet, they have developed the technology to transfer one's consciousness into a computer where the imprisoning biological robot-body is completely escaped. Yeah, I fear death all right, it's the hope for immortality that keeps me going, that makes me feel as though life might just have some meaning, some goal worth working towards. Maybe the reason why old people intrigue me so much is that they have no future in the future; they will never live forever. They were just born too early, poor things.

Despite my mind's minor obsession with death and dying, I knew, even as Tuesday approached, that I would not be engaging in any conversation about death on that day. The dying do not want to talk about death, just like those lacking but desperately needing a toilet don't wish to speak about waterfalls; they don't want to be reminded of what their body is already screaming at them.

Dinner with my wife on Tuesday night was frustrating but necessary. Dinnertime was the only time we had a chance to properly meet during the weekdays, and on this day's menu there was overcooked potatoes, dry mutton and a whole lot of nagging. The nagging was much better prepared than the meat, and it even had some accusations to go with it. I had been eating a whole lot of that lately, and I had a good mind to repay her generosity with a knuckle sandwich. But being the resigned man that I am I just sat there, nodded and agreed with everything she threw at me, like I always did. I suppose this was one of the things that made her so frustrated with me. I tried to talk to her about where I was going, and what I was about to do, but she was just as uninterested in what I had to say as she was when I had tried to tell her my story. She just didn't want to listen to me, she never did.